


Senju v Real Estate

by tothemovies (jayjem_jam)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Modern AU, they are probably bonding too, they are selling a house, they are tackling IKEA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23819371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayjem_jam/pseuds/tothemovies
Summary: This is the story:1. Father blew his money and liver in his countless nights drunk gambling away his health and luck for the vague possibilities of able to hit it big with a lottery syndicate deal - new flash: he doesn’t2. A trip to the doctor’s cramped and thick agarwood office revealed the unsurprisingly news that Father Dearest has liver failure and requires extensive medical treatment with the money they currently do not have3. They have two properties, one of which they do not live in, and the tenants have been effectively trashing their walls and putting cigarette burns into their carpet and there is a long legal haggle between Tobirama and the tenants and their lease is ending now we are taking no objections from you4. They are to sell the property, with the money they do not have - and they must be thrifty about it
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Senju v Real Estate

**Author's Note:**

> written for a year in naruto, thank you team for making this such a good experience

Itama was sleeping, and then he was toed awake -

"Whua --?" He yawns, unable to tell where the rest of him are.

"We're taking your bed. Get off it," Tobirama hisses in the dark and Itama - Itama has zero functioning higher brain functions in the morning and generally terrible humour - he thought it was hilarious, this entire situation, so he laughs himself off his own bed and rolls it out, still in hysterics. 

Kawarama is currently trying to pour boiling water onto a countertop. Aniki has to stop him before he pours scalding water everywhere and onto himself.

Itama thinks it is simultaneously the best and worst situation to be in. 

  
  


This is the story:

  1. Father blew his money and liver in his countless nights drunk gambling away his health and luck for the vague possibilities of able to hit it big with a lottery syndicate deal - new flash: he doesn’t
  2. A trip to the doctor’s cramped and thick agarwood office revealed the unsurprisingly news that Father Dearest has liver failure and requires extensive medical treatment with the money they currently do not have 
  3. They have two properties, one of which they do not live in, and the tenants have been effectively trashing their walls and putting cigarette burns into their carpet and there is a long legal haggle between Tobirama and the tenants and their lease is ending _now we are taking no objections from you_
  4. They are to sell the property, with the money they do not have - and they must be thrifty about it



A conversation, before the Bed Robbery -

“So I just got off the phone with the real estate agent -” Kawarama side steps Itama’s colossal Jenga monstrosity constructed thoroughly with shoes, waving his phone in the air. 

“And?” Hashirama strolls through the open doorway with another framed painting, sleeves rolled up beyond the muscle of his arm. 

“I thought I was talking with the agent?” Tobirama frowns from the kitchen, attacking their lunch.

Kawarama snorts, waving him aside. “Nii-san and _aniki,_ you're both banned from speaking to the real estate agent. You've made one cried and the other raised our commission price to like a 60% split. I refuse to let you handle the sales of our property -”

Tobirama can only raise a mildly offended  _ Hey!  _ as their oldest brother chuckles in embarrassed acknowledgement of his unreserved niceness. 

“So it’s costing us a lot of money that we don’t have for advertising, legal complexities outside of nii-san and photography - so let’s try to cut down on costs so that we can avoid bankruptcy at the end of this shit storm,” Kawarama bravely ignores all the commotion around him, waving his phone in the air like a surrender flag. 

“What can we live without?” Itama muses, stacking yet another shoe. “And I found the wallet! Have your wallet!”

Hashirama accepts the prize possession - a courting gift from an Uchiha  Madara ,  _ urgh, gross, aniki, keep your gay married couple vibes away from us -  _ with an abundant of gratitude, ruffling his brother’s head cheerfully.

“We can probably live through six weeks of minimal furniture,” Tobirama hums from his stove. “To save up on the costs of furniture rental.”

“Which we don’t need,” Itama stresses. Tobirama rightly scowls at him.

"Why though," Kawarama purses his lips at his brother. "Why do we need a pretty house instead of an empty property?"

"The statistics strongly suggest that decorated homes sell for more and sell faster," their brother grouches back, mummifying bentos in cling wrap with murderous aggression. 

"Which statistics?" Kawarama insists. 

"Damn, Kawarama, I don't  _ know, _ I'm not a statistics major?" The Grumpy Grandpa frowns. 

“I don't see the point still," Itama calmly unstacks his Jenga structure, "but you insisted, so here we are. Definite  _ minimal.”  _

Kawarama shrugs, turning to him. “You’re looking at like, no beds for all of us except Father Dearest, more than a month? Maybe less if we sell it faster?”

Itama promptly does not take any words his brother tells him at face value and laughs first and foremost, at Kawarama.

Hashirama, sweet and dependable airhead Hashirama, professes bravely - “So what if we don't have beds! Our ancestors slept on grounds!”

Kawarama groans from behind his hand. “It’s still debated ground and that's an admirable attitude,  _ aniki _ , but I've been conditioned to luxury so I will bitch about not having a bed.”

I tama points a disdainful shoelace at all of them, eye rolling at all of his older brothers. “Question. Can you miss something you’ve never had?” At his brothers’ opening mouths to possibly answer his question, clearly rhetorical, he interrupts them. “Wrong. No. It was rhetorical. Listen, nii-san, our ancestors probably didn't know what a bed was, because that hasn’t been invented  _ yet. _ So using that example was just fake deep, because they didn’t know any better, they’ve never had a bed before. Now stop talking about furniture theft and pack everything up, Touka-san is coming over and she’s going to yell at us if the house is in shambles,  _ again.”  _

He still thinks they’re joking. 

Tobirama’s only helpful commentary to the Furniture Robbery Endeavour was - _ I'm going to sleep in the library if this is the rate that we are heading towards. _

Itama, at present time, at the breakfast table devoid of two chairs, careening face first into the wooden flat surface and Tobirama’s plate of heated stir fry, cannot help the hysterical laughter bubbling out of him.

Kawarama makes a gesture that somehow conveyed perfectly -  _ Look, you broke him -  _ to which Tobirama reacts with an airborne ladle. Lobbed. At Kawarama’s head. Which he dodged easily, and the ladle ended up knocking the hair tie out of Hashirama’s fingers.

“What do you monsters want now,” Itama mumbles, clearly at peace at the knowledge that he had relinquished his soul to all the demons not guarding the land and he’s forsaking his brothers on top of it. It is still pitch dark outside - but not for long. They have to adapt to the harsh summers here in Melbourne by beating up the sun’s ascent to the sky very quickly from the time frame of six forty-eight AM to six fifty AM and they’re awful at tolerating the heat so here they are. Bleary-eyed and unfortunately awake. Even Itama, a soul who swears to fight the sun in his youth up until this day.

"We're going to IKEA. For strictly decorative items that will sell the house quick and fast after we've cleaned it through," Tobirama, speaking like a drill sergeant, declares from the pantry where he is trying to squint at something on his phone. 

"I'm not driving," is Kawarama's immediate reaction.

_ Aniki  _ pulls out a set of keys, widely smiling, like a refreshing breeze drifting through their cursed place of residence. 

_ " Aniki  _ will take care of you!" He beams.

Itama mutters gratefully -  _ Thank the ancestors for aniki. _

Pulling into the carpark, Tobirama made them all swear solemnly on their phones that they will not make an idiot of themselves and all they are buying is the  _ absolute minimum, do you hear me, aniki? _

Only after a short phone call to Touka and Madara, who both yell at the clown entourage, they tromp inside the elevator, beelining towards the bedroom display first.

There are only three beds that are required for the property photos - and they need to style those for the maximum selling capacity.

No one really quite suggest the stupid idea of  _ let's buy another bed,  _ though Itama did stare at this reading chair for quite a while. 

The brothers chip in their own beds as per the agreement to cut down costs. They can live without beds. Just use  _ futon  _ or nap on the tattered couch by the study. There was a spare bed, besides Father's, that all the brothers have been shoving aggressively onto each other.  _ No, _ **_you_ ** _ have it _ \- their version of Hot Potato - had been a constant in their household every time nightfall arrives. Their brothers' comfort comes before theirs, and it is only a small inconvenience to face if there is ultimately some scraps of comfort that their brothers can acquire out of their sacrifice. 

All of them had berated the other for being  _ a colossal moron,  _ while inwardly being secretly proud that their brother isn't suffering as much. It's stupid. It's sappy. They don't  _ do  _ sappy. Or brotherhood. 

  
  


They're huddled before the bedroom display, all inspecting the strategic layout of each style of bedroom to cater for a wide variety of personality. There is a theme that they are going for -  _ minimalistic _ because Tobirama told them that  _ broke and trying to subsist on the bare minimum furniture isn't a personality, that's a statement of your bank account.  _ The man himself is squinting at a low table to strategically place in the lounge area, glasses nowhere in place - Kawarama nagged at him to wear his  _ damn telescope eye lenses, you law student disaster  _ to active refusal of his nagging. Hashirama and Kawarama had been speed-walking throughout all of the displays twice now, debating in passive aggressive Japanese and English on the benefits of decorative art on the entertainment unit their grandfather won in a pig race. In Thailand.

Tobirama reaches a hand out to grab onto any brother who are not so discreetly hovering around him in apparent fear that he’s going to trip and brain himself on display furniture and they have to scrape him off the Ekenäset like a bad and splotchy omelette. 

Tobirama is squinting now, closing his hand around the wrist of Brother Number Three, also goes by Kawarama sometimes. “Hey, how many cents is this?” He asks, tipping his chin to the price tag of a white coffee table. 

Kawarama, who was still in active debate with Most Eldest Brother, turns to humour his Second Brother with just the bare minimum of - “Zero cents”, as the price tag reliably informs him. 

Tobirama is startled. “Zero cents? It’s free?!”

Itama, who had been collecting pillowcases in the situation that they don’t make it to the Bedroom Objective on their IKEA Agenda, there is a fallback, chips in the conversation, because he knows that Kawarama can be disastrously literal at all times and fails to answer the True Question intended by the ask...asker? 

“Zero cents and seventy-eight dollars, nii-san,” he cheerily informs his brother. 

He might as well had set their entire study on fire and spit on their mother’s grave, because Tobirama’s entire expression falls within two seconds. Kawarama heartlessly comments on top of a small grass fire patch burgeoning its way to a full scale seasonal inconvenience -

“Nii-san, how can something be free in this economy?”

Itama slaps him with the full brunt of the quilt cover set packaging, but the damage had been done. Tobirama mournfully steps onward, lamenting that he should have stayed home. 

  
  


(They make it through to the bedroom display and onto the kitchen display, surprisingly. For someone who denies all affiliations with  _ Aniki,  _ somehow Tobirama sulks  _ exactly like him,  _ down to the eyes. Itama forbids Kawarama from laughing any further, and tasks him with looking after all their carefully chosen and vetted products.

They found a cheaper and actually prettier coffee table to assuage their brother’s pains of No Free Things In This Economy, and he is restored back to his shouty mood as  _ Aniki  _ notes down the location and name of the table.)

  
  


“Last time I was in IKEA,” Tobirama begins.

“Must have been like a decade ago,” Itama mumbles, crossing off items on his list and trying to zoom in on a home display on the Ray White website. “Do we need candles?”

“It was a decade ago,” Tobirama continues with confidence. Then a pause. _“-ish,_ but I digress. The point is that last time -”

Kawarama had pulled approximately four scenting sticks from their designated jars in the span of that very short and stilted conversation, hissing to his brothers. “Ooh smell this one, it’s like sandalwood!”

“Have they always had scent sticks in here?” Itama quizzes, brows bunching close together.

The noise Tobirama lets out might as well be the same one boiling water makes inside a kettle. “No. No they have not. Kawarama, put that down.”

Hashirama meanwhile is indulging his brother, like the angel he is, “I don’t actually know what sandalwood smells like.”

Itama, closing in on him, and about to confiscate everything before his brother starts to mix all the scents and shatter all the jars because he’s achieved a higher state of being via artificially crafted esters in pharmaceutical laboratories, puts a hand on the jar, about to wrench it off him. “Then how do you know it’s sandalwood?” He indulges, but prises fingers off the glass.

Kawarama is a sensible person on good days and an absolute menace on other days, pulls back the jar to his chest and starts spraying scented water at him like a baptism. 

“It’s sandalwood because I  _ said so,”  _ he impishly declares.

“That’s a tester,” Itama tersely reminds him. Even harsher sprays of water attack him and his nose. It is positively  _ pungent.  _ “And it’s going to run out.”

Tobirama had been sighing from the side, to zero involvement of extraction or intervention. Someone had called a staff, who worriedly hovers nearby with fear in his eyes. The albino bows at the employee, morosely apologising.

“Please excuse my brother -”

Kawarama holds up the tester bottle, loudly crowing in Japanese. “I’m gonna recreate this scent and rip this minimalistic company from...7 dollars profit, nii-san, help me, I’m not a math major.”

Hashirama, because he pities all of them, and also he’s the tallest and with the most authority, swipes the jar from Kawarama’s hand easily and stows it onto the highest shelf with all the picture frames, herding them away lest another baptism and anti-capitalistic attempt is made. 

Tobirama bows one last time. “He’s an aspiring cosmetologist,” he finishes, as if that explains anything, and turns on his shoes and marches off with his brothers.

  
  
  


The IKEA Condition Curse starts to set in by the second hour. 

They’ve mostly gotten everything, just a few plates and mugs here and there to symbolically and falsely advertise that there could be people living at the empty property. It was  _ aniki’s  _ insistence and honestly it wouldn’t hurt anyone, so  _ why not?  _

Itama, fully sitting in the low trolley, tells his brothers, very seriously. 

“Nii-san. I want to buy everything in here.”

Kawarama, because he’s the spirit of understanding, nods wisely. “That’s how they get you.”

Nobody paid him any mind. He never speaks sense when he’s fresh from an anti-capitalist soliloquy in a public forum. 

Tobirama is inspecting a throw rug, something he had been holding tightly to ever since the entrance. "Hey. Stupid brothers of mine. How bad of an investment is it to buy a forty dollars throw rug?”

Itama clasps a fist to his palm, emphatically nodding. “That's fucking terrible, let's throw in this lamp too,” he says, and pats the lamp under his arm. Hashirama helped him with the extraction of this piece of furniture and he loves  _ aniki  _ for it. “For aesthetics.”

There is a hotly protested - “Hey! No swearing! We have children present!” - from Kawarama, no less.

Itama rolls his eyes. “Nii-san, I'm the youngest h -”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence. Kawarama bowls him over with - “No, not you. It's me. I'm baby.”

There is enough of thinking space for Tobirama to blink and declare. “Right, yep, we’re stuffing him in aisle fourteen, under all the heavy doors, and then we leave and we’re moving addresses.  _ Aniki,  _ you get his shoulder, I’ll grab the back of his knees, let me just -”

Hashirama very calmly holds back Tobirama with a serene smile on his face, while telling off Itama for swearing and Kawarama for ‘riling up your nii-san, you know he’s like this.’

“Remember to place everything so the barcode is facing out,” he very sweetly tells Itama, tone like the sharpening of a guillotine before it does its thing. “No fighting,” he smiles at the other two. “Or I will put Vegemite in your coffee.”

They fall into line soon after. 

  
  


Itama still thinks they should have auctioned Father off in the Human Trafficking Black Market Network or pawn off his kidneys, because it’s one thing to go to IKEA and come out alive, and it’s another thing to assemble everything and come out  _ sane.  _

He’s staring at the unassembled table, with abject horror. 

“I have never felt so incompetent. And I'm a robotics major. I’m meant to be like, a natural at putting random parts of a whole together. Assembling is meant to be in my blood. I’m not doing it. What’s  _ wrong  _ with me?”

Tobirama is passing by and snorting at the top of his head, pushing his tag under his collar. “IKEA inspires specific feelings of incompetence in those who are stupid enough to buy their products and wrangle the bits into completion. Don’t let it get to your major selections at school.”

He barely finished his sentence when Kawarama, on the other side of the room, whoops loudly and triumphantly. 

“Ah ha! Have a table, plebs!”

Hashirama, still holding a wrench in one hand and dazedly staring at his own instruction booklet in Swedish, looks up in awe and fear, at Tobirama’s incredulous eyes. :I don't know how he does it but he did it.”

Tobirama, not very good at complimenting his brothers and using nice words in general, scoffs. “Oh great, another thing he is uselessly competent at.”

It was supposed to sound like a compliment, but Kawarama will take what he can get.

He tips his nose up to the ceiling, shaking his hair out of his eyes. “Being able to assemble ikea furniture isn't  _ just  _ a thing, it's a life skill, nii-san. Something even  _ I  _ now have.”

Itama still thinks it’s not too late to start putting up kidneys for sale so they can pay off those outstanding hospital fees. 

**Author's Note:**

> 90% of this was inspired by actual genuine real life events please have sympathy for me, your local author
> 
> find me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/hozukitofu) and [cc](https://curiouscat.me/jenny_benny)! i have a writing [twitter](https://twitter.com/jayjem_jam) if anyone is interested in more bs or we can just vibe in the void together


End file.
